Citilink to concentrate on flights to eastern Indonesia

Chief Executive of Citilink Indonesia Albert Burhan said the airline would focus on expanding flights to eastern Indonesia this year.

Albert said there are potential routes to eastern Indonesia, which have not attracted other airlines.

“There will be plan to open routes to other areas in Papua, but we start from Jayapura. In 2017 we want to focus on expanding flights to eastern regions of the country,” he said.

He said he knew not all airports in eastern Indonesia could take wide bodied aircraft like Airbus, the main aircraft of the subsidiary of the nations flag carrier Garuda Indonesia.

“Only a few could be used for Airbus A320. We might have to rely more on ATR aircraft to be safe,” he said.

He said eastern Indonesia still needs more airlines to serve flight to and from eastern Indonesia.

He said he was optimistic Citilink could chalk up quite high load factor in flights between Jayapura and Jakarta, although there are already a number of other airlines serving the route.

“Our target is a load factor of 80 percent. In our first flight from Jakarta to Jayapura the load factor was almost 100 percent,” he said.

Citilink Indonesia officially started serving the Jakarta Jayapura route on Monday using Airbus A320 with a seat capacity of 180 passengers.